Title: Multicomponent high-entropy cantor alloys

Abstract

All human advances have depended on making new materials, and all materials are alloys, i.e. mixtures of several different starting materials or components. So the history of the human race has been the continued invention of new materials by discovering new alloys. Recently a new way of doing this, by manufacturing multicomponent high-entropy alloys, has shown that the total number of possible materials is enormous, even more than the number of atoms in the galaxy, so we have lots of wonderful new materials yet to find. And multicomponent phase space contains a surprisingly large number of extended solid solutions. The first group of these which was discovered are called Cantor alloys, an enormous composition range with a single-phase Fcc structure, based loosely on the original equiatomic five-component Cantor alloy CrMnFeCoNi. This talk will discuss the previous history of alloying, the discovery of multicomponent alloys, the structure of multicomponent phase space, the fundamental thermodynamics of multicomponent solid solutions such as the Cantor alloys, the complexity of local atomic and nanoscale configurations in such materials, the effect of this on properties such as atomic diffusion, dislocation slip, and the resulting outstanding mechanical properties and potential applications.